Data storage devices for archiving applications are a dynamic field of research. Research efforts are driven by the fact that more and more information is available as digital data, only. On the one hand, there is a large amount of digital data that has to be archived. On the other hand, the storage medium has to provide a long term data stability.
Especially for film studios producing an increasing number of digital movies, data archiving is an important issue. The annual average production of digital movie data of the major Hollywood studios is in the range of PByte and is steadily increasing. There is a need for storing a huge amount of data every single year. The digital movie data is one of the assets for each film studio. Movie data has to be available for repurposing movie data in future projects or for reissue of historical movies. Accordingly, there is an urgent need for every film studio to carefully archive the precious media data for long periods.
State of the art technologies, e.g. magnetic tape drives or hard disc drives allow storing a huge amount of data and provide acceptable data throughput rates. However, the data retention time of these technologies is limited to several years. For instance, a crucial restriction of hard disc drives is their limited life span of about five years. Today, there is no cheap and reliable mass storage technology that offers data retention times of at least several decades or even more. Due to this technical limitation, media production studios still use traditional analog media for archiving purposes. This however is a cost intensive and time consuming process. A digital long term stable archiving system allowing a digital-to-digital media backup is urgently needed for safeguarding the media industry's assets.